


Night Will Bring No Dawn

by Consort of the Moribund (Inksinger)



Series: Night Will Bring No Dawn [2]
Category: Warcraft III, World of Warcraft
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cannibalism, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Graphic Description, Implied Cannibalism, Implied Relationships, Loss of Faith, Loss of Identity, Major Character Injury, Major Character Insanity, Major Character Undeath, Major character death - Freeform, Molestation, Multi, Permanent Injury, Physical Abuse, Plague, Prisoner of War, Psychological Horror, Psychological Torture, Psychological Trauma, Rape, Rewrite, dubcon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2016-04-06
Packaged: 2018-03-21 21:03:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3704759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inksinger/pseuds/Consort%20of%20the%20Moribund
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU — While leading a hopeless last stand against the Scourge in defense of the Sunwell, Lor'themar catches the attention of the future Lich King and is taken prisoner. It soon becomes apparent that Arthas is not interested in turning the elf into another mindless undead slave—but the alternative is hardly better.</p><p>Story begins shortly after the events documented in The Fall of Silvermoon (fifth campaign, Path of the Damned, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos) and should continue on past the endgame of World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King. Rated for later events and colorful descriptions throughout. Not for the squeamish.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Where Once was Light

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Night Will Bring No Dawn](https://archiveofourown.org/works/968333) by [Inksinger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inksinger/pseuds/Inksinger), [Nighthaunting](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nighthaunting/pseuds/Nighthaunting). 



Lor’themar had not gone into that last, desperate battle with much hope.

He was no fool; he had known that the ragged forces he had managed to rally in the Sunwell's defense stood next to no chance of keeping their sacred well out of Arthas' hands. They had lost too much already: family, friends, homes, all decimated under wave after wave of living death. The warriors who still stood with him had been too few and too weary to truly hope to survive for long against the unrelenting forces of the Scourge.

He had seen the same grim understanding in the eyes of each of his soldiers as they had stood waiting for the Scourge to appear. They had all expected to die, and to be raised as more mindless, shambling corpses, forsaken evermore by the Light. They had all been willing to make that sacrifice, futile though it was.

The knowledge of this had driven Lor'themar into an unholy rage, lending him strength and speed he hadn't thought himself capable of as he had carved a path through the undead filth around him. If that was to be their last stand, they would at least make it one to be remembered.

Yet as they had battled on, there had come a moment when the tide almost seemed to turn in their favor. It had suddenly become possible to spot more living soldiers than unliving, and those who still stood had begun to press their seeming opening with a collective cry of victory. For a moment, there had been hope that they could yet push the invaders back.

Arthas had appeared soon after, clad in bone-littered armor which had seemed to devour the light shining upon it. He had ridden astride a skeleton horse clothed in tattered finery, and behind him had marched a swarm of fresh soldiers, greater in number than the army the elves had already begun to beat back.

Their hope had withered away like the grass touched by the frost surrounding him.

It had been bitterly clear to Lor’themar that Arthas had kept the larger portion of his fetid horde back for exactly this purpose: to raise and then crush the last of the elven forces’ hope, crippling them with one sadistic blow before swooping in for the kill.

His plan had worked for a moment. At his appearance, more than a few fair voices had risen in dismay, and three warriors near Lor’themar fell, cut down by their foes in the precious few seconds they froze to stare at the second wave of undead. Where they had been pushing the monsters away from the Well, the elves who battled on had begun to creep steadily back, cowering towards that which they protected as though its energy alone could save them.

From where he had battled a pair of skeletons, Lor'themar had seen Arthas raise his hand above his head. There had been a breath of stillness among the second wave of the Scourge—and then Arthas had flicked two fingers down, straight towards the elven forces.

The second wave had fallen upon them like a hurricane.

With a roar, Lor'themar had broken free from his latest opponents and charged to meet the swarm head-on. Behind him, his warriors had let out cries of their own as they fought to follow him forward.

The elven forces had fought valiantly, as ferocious even now as hawkstriders defending their nests. Lor’themar had torn down skeleton after zombie after patchwork horror; across the field, he had glimpsed Halduron ripping his way through a similar string of foes, working to get closer to him. Fireballs had flown from the elven forces, lighting the undead invaders aflame like grisly torches. Blades had flashed like silver flames in the misty morning light, slicing through disintegrating flesh and brittle bones as easily as if they were warm butter.

Yet for all their vigor, it was only too clear the elves would soon be forced to retreat or die. The Scourge had not dwindled—wherever one reanimated corpse fell, three more had fallen on the living warrior responsible, and not all those corpses that had gone down remained still. Even those zombies cut in half at the waists or stomachs were able to grab onto the ankles of the living soldiers, immobilizing or tripping them up long enough for a more mobile opponent to strike them down.

Lor’themar’s blind rage had not lasted, and soon even he had grown weary; his movements had become slower and clumsier, and soon more and more saronite blades and rotted claws had found purchase against his skin as his foes finally began to beat him back with the rest.

By chance he had looked up from another fallen skeleton and found Arthas watching from behind his forces, sitting proud and straight as though the battle was nothing more than a noisy gathering at a marketplace.

Perhaps he had felt the ranger’s eyes on him, for Arthas had suddenly turned his gaze on Lor’themar and raised his chin as if to ask why in the world the high elf was watching him instead of killing—

—that zombie! A flash of his knives and the thing had lain in pieces at Lor’themar’s feet, and then the elf had been too busy fending off another abomination to worry about the chilly gaze that still seemed to bore into him from where Arthas sat observing the chaos.

Something bony and distinctly slimy had latched onto one of Lor’themar’s ankles, tripping him up as he moved to slash at yet another undead thing. With a curse, he had bent low and sliced the hand off the zombie who’d grabbed him, then straightened and delivered a kick to its head that had sent it rolling off the thing’s shoulders and off towards Arthas and his rotted steed.

Once again, Lor’themar’s eyes had strayed to the bastard prince, and narrowed as he noted how much closer the man had ridden. If he sought combat with Lor’themar, he was welcome to come and do his worst, and learn firsthand the rage of the Quel'dorei—

The look on Arthas’ face had shifted suddenly to a wickedly amused smirk. Something hard had come down across the back of Lor'themar's head, knocking him to the ground as darkness rushed to swallow him up.

He never heard Halduron’s call for their forces to retreat.

✴

Lor'themar was awakened sometime later by the thundering ache radiating from the back of his skull.

He tried to roll onto his back, only to stop as the spiked saronite chains binding his arms and legs dug painfully into his skin. The ranger hissed and rolled carefully onto his back again, blinking as his eyes watered with the effort. He must have been stripped of his armor; those spikes would not have been sharp enough to gouge him so sharply through leather.

It was too soon to shred himself trying to work the chains loose. Instead he laid still for the moment and surveyed his surroundings as well as he could.

It was immediately obvious that he was in the back of a decrepit wagon: Four rotting wooden walls rose up around him, stained with a myriad dark splotches he could only assume had once been blood. Yet despite these and the stench of death and decay that choked the air, the wagon's only cargo—other than Lor'themar himself—appeared to be looted armor and stacks of filthy hides.

It took no great leap of logic to realize that he was now a prisoner of the Scourge.

Though he had no way of knowing it, the high elf had come to only a few hours after the Scourge forces had finally left ruined Quel'Thalas behind. Now they marched towards the Alterac Mountains, doubling back for the moment through their own swaths of destruction.

With a grunt, Lor'themar managed to drag himself clumsily upright and scoot back until he could lean against a stack of furs, some of which were immediately recognizable as having once belonged to springpaw lynxes. It was clear that the pelts had been hastily ripped away from the carcasses; decaying meat and sinew still clung to them, and there were a few stray slashes through the topmost hide, as though the skinner had worked with only moments to spare. The waste made Lor'themar sick, but at least this explained once and for all how the unliving beasts he and the other rangers had been forced to put down had been left with only a few scraps of their fur still clinging to their naked bodies.

The ringing in his ears was beginning to fade; eventually Lor'themar became able to identify some of the facets of the cacophony of sound surrounding him. He could pick out the clamor of the wagon's wheels clattering along the rocky ground, the rattling of bones inside otherwise empty armor, the occasional wheezes and moans of those wretches 'fortunate' enough to have retained the use of their vocal chords.

Lor'themar closed his eyes as the wagon hit a small bump in the road, jostling him just enough that his head spun and throbbed with renewed pain. For a moment he felt nauseous; he let his lips part and breathed shallowly until the feeling passed.

When the ache dulled again to a more manageable level, he opened his eyes again and looked down at himself. He had been stripped of his jerkin and spaulders; his besagews and couters and bracers; his faulds and greaves; his gloves with their steel-reinforced knuckles and his shoes with their steel-reinforced toes. Even his belt and the thin blade hidden in its buckle had been taken from him, as had the knives he had kept strapped to the insides of his wrists and ankles. Like as not, his gear had all been dumped into a different wagon than his.

He didn't make a pretty sight in just his breeches and tunic. Great rips had been torn in the thick fabric, though he was so splattered in blood and the ichor of his undead foes that he had some difficulty at times discerning where his tattered clothes ended and his skin began. It mattered little; he didn't need to see the gashes and bruises in his flesh to know they were there. His whole body ached with his wounds, most sharply along the lines of his bindings. Light only knew how long he had lain across those damned chains.

Lor'themar stifled a groan and leaned back against the furs. His hair felt matted against his scalp; what he could see of it was knotted with blood, ichor, and dust. The snarls in it pulled uncomfortably at his scalp, making his head ache just that much more.

He turned his eyes upwards again, studying what he could see past the wagon's walls. The sky overhead was obscured by thick smoke the color of river slime, and all around the tops of sickly, wilting trees marched slowly by. They were not trees native to Quel'Thalas; no conifers had ever grown there in Lor'themar's lifetime, and yet these were all pines and firs.

Where on Azeroth were they...?

Another wave of pain thundered through his skull, and Lor'themar squeezed his eyes shut as he bit back a livid curse. Had he been struck across the head? Was _that_ how they had gotten hold of him?

His memories of the battle at the Sunwell were fuzzy, filled with the chaos of blood and battle cries and undead horrors that had glared with unseeing eye sockets and fetid lumps that had once been eyeballs. He vaguely remembered the utter rage that had swamped him on seeing Arthas appear with another wave of undead soldiers, spurring him blindly on ahead of his own warriors. He remembered Halduron cutting down undead after undead, fighting to get to him…

He growled as the rest of the fight blurred and faded to darkness in his mind’s eye. What the hell had happened after that second wave had arrived?!

The wagon hit a pothole in the road, sending its cargo and Lor'themar tumbling about across the floor. The high elf grunted as he landed hard on the chains; the impact drove the spikes into his skin again and momentarily knocked the wind from his lungs as some of the furs slipped down on top of him.

A rasping bark went up from one of the undead. A moment later, the wagon was jostled again and a sun-bleached skeleton in tattered cloth armor peeked in over one of the walls. It eyed Lor'themar with sockets that glowed an ugly pinkish-red, tilting its head as the ranger glared back at it.

Lor'themar growled. Bound and battered as he was, a newborn dragonhawk would have posed a greater threat than he did, and he could swear that damned skeleton knew it. It didn't help that its nearly naked skull looked like it was leering at him.

The skeleton clacked its teeth at him, then hopped down and wheezed something Lor’themar didn’t quite catch—Light above, did the beasts have their own _language_ , as well?

Whatever was said did nothing to slow or halt the procession. After another moment Lor’themar dragged himself up again, shaking the lynx pelts off and leaning into a corner between the stack of furs and the wall of the wagon. He braced himself as well as he could with his legs and again closed his eyes against the relentless ache in his skull.

Despite the pain, his mind was slowly becoming clearer; freed of the fog of unconsciousness, Lor'themar was able now to think through the pounding in his head and the biting chill of the chains. His thoughts turned immediately to his present situation: Somehow, he was still alive, and in relatively decent shape in spite of the conditions surrounding his capture.

_Why?_

The Scourge could not possibly have any use for living prisoners, least of all prisoners from a land they had surely already conquered—and as much as the thought sickened him, Lor'themar was forced to admit that the Scourge must have finally captured the Sunwell. His soldiers had been too sorely outnumbered to have been victorious. Beyond that, why else would they now leave Quel'Thalas behind them? Even Quel'Thalas' strongest defenses had not driven the Scourge away; surely no ragged band of civilians, rangers, and mages would have.

Lor'themar couldn't imagine he was needed as a slave, either. The Scourge were undead and mindlessly obedient to their masters; why keep their slaves alive and likely to rebel, when slaying them would create workers who were both docile and far less likely to grow tired or hungry?

There could only be one reason Lor'themar was still alive. Arthas had to have ordered it; none of these abominations would have given a second thought to killing Lor'themar if Arthas had not ordered otherwise. But _why?_

The wagon hit another bump, and Lor'themar growled as his thoughts were sent scattering again. Were they even _on_ a blasted road, or were the Scourge simply mowing down the local wildlife as they went?!

He scowled up at the sky, dragging his mind back into focus. If Arthas had ordered Lor'themar's capture, he may have ordered the capture of other elves, as well. Lor'themar's lack of company didn't necessarily negate that possibility; in fact, if there _were_ other living prisoners, it made more sense to keep him away from them. In Arthas' position, Lor'themar would have wanted to keep any ringleaders secluded from the other captives in order to lessen the chance that they might attempt to escape or attack their captors.

That still didn't answer why any of them were being kept alive at all. Did Arthas seek to use them as examples of some sort? Did he plan to torture and kill them in front of whoever his next victims might be? It certainly seemed to be the sort of thing the bastard would consider.

Lor'themar tested the chains around his arms. They were wrapped tightly, but there was still some give to them. Good.

With a grunt, he began working against his restraints, leaning away from the wall so that the chains wouldn't scrape at the wood and alert any of his captors. The spikes tore unforgivingly into his skin, and he bared his teeth in a soundless snarl as blood started to trickle down his arms.

Slowly, painfully, he felt his right arm begin to slip under the chains, and after a long struggle his arm had moved enough that the links farthest to his left now dug into his wrist. Winded from the pain and the effort he’d exerted, Lor’themar stopped and leaned back again, his chest heaving slightly as he glared up at the sky.

This was taking longer than he had anticipated; at this rate, surely something would check on him again. It would be just his luck if he were to be caught either struggling to get free or working at the chains around his ankles.

He didn’t hold much hope for his chances of survival if that happened; even once he caught his breath and started working at the chains again, his strength was noticeably diminished. If something caught him working to free himself, Lor’themar doubted his ability to fight it off, much less disarm it… and even if he _could_ get away from the first one, there was an entire army of the enemy around him and Arthas was doubtlessly close enough to order the elf killed and reanimated on the spot.

The links against his wrist slid up another few centimeters, biting into the fleshy heel of Lor’themar’s right hand. With a grimace, he decided this was a risk he would have to take—if he could keep up this pace and will himself not to clench his fist against the chains, he would have his arms free in another ten minutes or less. He was too far along to stop now.

There was an odd, scratching sort of sound near the wagon, somewhat like a low-blowing wind disturbing a patch of sand in short, hungry gusts. The wagon jolted again, and Lor’themar shoved himself as far into his corner as he could. He was just in time; seconds later a rotted zombie poked its ugly head over the wall he leaned against and stared at him with its good eye. The other eye swung from its socket on the jerky-like remains of its ocular nerve.

What was left of the wretched creature’s nose twitched in time with the scratching sound, and with an inward curse Lor’themar realized it had smelled the blood he’d spilled trying to free himself. Unfortunately, the unliving thing above him was beginning to look decidedly hungry.

Images flashed unwarranted through his mind—memories of catching a few scattered undead scavenging the bodies of fallen magi, rangers, and warriors, of cutting down a more well-preserved menace when it had mistaken him for dead meat and had tried to eat his left arm. The Scourge ate any meat they could find, much the same way vampires fed on the blood and life-force of their victims. There was no hunger behind that cannibalism, only an emptiness they tried to fill by devouring anything that bled and held still long enough for them to grab.

And Lor’themar was bleeding again.

His mind raced as the zombie continued sniffing at him. All he could think to do was hold very, very still and pray to whatever deity would listen that the thing would get bored and go away if it couldn’t see the blood—or that something more in command of itself would think it was misbehaving and yank it away from the wagon.

The thing stared plaintively at him for another long moment; then, with a final, sad-sounding huff, it jumped down from the side of the wagon, ostensibly to resume its shambling march.

Lor’themar released the breath he’d been holding, then leaned forward and began again to work against the chains on his arms. The links were biting into his knuckles now, but they were beginning to loosen infinitesimally—

The wagon rocked more violently this time; the partially-rotted wood creaked and groaned as the same zombie and another in even worse repair leapt onto the wagon and scrambled in with Lor’themar. Sickly, milky-grey drool glistened in their mouths and dribbled down onto the floor as they advanced towards the chained elf, dead eyes blank with hunger.

Lor'themar snarled, and with a last, desperate twist and jerk, he ripped his right arm free of the chains. The skin was slashed to hell, bloodied but not pouring enough to kill him… yet. In the same instant, both of the undead horrors charged him, one letting out a warbling, high-pitched yowl as it reached wildly for him.

Lor’themar rolled clumsily to the side, running into a shoddily-sealed crate of armor before somehow managing to drag himself to his feet and snagging the chipped knife at the yowling zombie’s hip. As the thing turned to face him again, Lor’themar brought the blade down across its arm, nearly severing the limb.

The second zombie shoved its competition out of the way and swiped at Lor’themar with a hiss—clearly this one didn’t have quite the same use of its vocal chords as the other, which for the moment poked dumbly at its arm as though it wasn’t sure why the limb was hanging by a few rotted strands of muscle.

Before the scuffle could go much further, the wagon jerked to a stop; caught unprepared, all three of the combatants inside toppled against each other, landing in a heap against a pile of leather gear. Lor’themar spat a particularly foul oath and kicked the better-preserved zombie off of him, then rolled off the one now entirely missing its arm before its remaining hand could close on any part of him.

A loud, clear voice outside the wagon spat something in the same language Lor’themar had heard from the skeleton soldier before. Both zombies stiffened and seemed to cower for a moment before reluctantly scrambling back out of the wagon; the creature Lor’themar had disarmed and then hacked at even stopped and picked its arm up almost robotically before following its companion outside—although it also paused to cast Lor’themar a final sorrowful look before disappearing over the wall of the wagon.

Lor’themar stiffened as the sound of hooves on frost-hardened ground reached his ears, growing louder as the beast drew close to the wagon… and then stopped. There was a brief silence, and then the back of the wagon opened down, allowing a handful of skeletons to swarm in.

Lor’themar didn’t have time to do more than raise his stolen knife in defense before the soldiers had grabbed him and wrestled him to the floor, their bones clicking and creaking like a basket of castanets as they kept him pinned and forced the knife out of his hand. The elf struggled against them, but with his ankles still securely chained, the blood flowing from his arm only now beginning to slow, and a good portion of his energy spent freeing himself and then keeping himself from becoming a meal, there wasn’t much more he could do other than squirm uselessly and curse a bloody blue streak at the undead.

"Oh, good," someone said from behind the wagon. "You’ve still got plenty of fight left in you after all. I was beginning to think you’d gone and died on me."

Lor’themar craned his head to see Arthas sitting astride his steed, watching him with his arms folded across his chest and that damned patronizing smirk plastered on his sickly pale face.

"What would it matter if I had?" Lor’themar spat. He regretted the words almost as soon as they left his mouth. Brilliant; clever thing that he was, perhaps if he managed to escape with his life he should go waltzing into troll territory in nothing but his breeches.

Arthas’ smirk turned into a razor-sharp grin as he answered, “Oh, I don’t want you to die just yet. That would take all the fun out of it.”

"Out of wh—"

For the second time in as many days, a heavy blow came down across the back of Lor’themar’s head, knocking the captive ranger unconscious once more. As he slid again into blackness, he vaguely registered Arthas ordering the skeletons pinning him down to bind his arms again—and do so _properly._


	2. Midnight Hour

Scourge soldiers milled aimlessly about through the trees; wherever they walked, a sickly mist followed, tainting the air and seeping deep underground to poison the roots of all the surrounding plant life, rotting it from the inside out.

No birds flew above, and no beasts walked the earth around them. The stink of death had driven away all living things that were capable of flight; those that had not fled swiftly enough had quickly found themselves ripped to pieces by hungry ghouls, or infected by the polluted air and left to suffer a slow, agonizing descent into undeath. Most of these latter unfortunates thrashed in the throes of their corruption, stripping great hunks of hide and flesh from their sides as they hurled themselves against trees and down steep embankments.

Lor'themar bit back a livid curse as he took in his new surroundings. His ears rang and his skull felt ready to explode—why? He remembered trying to work free of his chains in the back of a rotting cargo wagon, and being caught by two drooling zombies... had they managed to overpower him? How had he not been killed then?

The chains were tighter, now, enough that he could feel their spikes digging into the open gouges in his arms even when he held perfectly still. That at least made sense; he had been discovered by at least two of the undead. Perhaps he had survived whatever followed because they had alerted Arthas after wrestling him down.

The skin around his wounds felt dry, and the edges itched uncomfortably but did not sting with the pain of fresh lacerations. His bindings had been fixed at least several hours ago, then.

Damn this! He growled through gritted teeth and carefully tipped his head back against—was that a tree?

He pressed himself harder against the surface at his back. That was definitely bark... but what an odd texture! It felt almost spongy; a strip flaked easily away under his fingers, and felt solid on one side, but fibrous on the other.

That was... familiar. What tree was this? Why did he recognize...?

_Ah._

It was a redwood. That was right; he had once traveled into a redwood forest. Then, as now, he had marveled at the unique bark those trees possessed.

There were no redwoods anywhere near Quel'Thalas. That put him... several miles or better beyond the borders. South of them, as well, or else southwest. That would mean they traveled roughly towards—

Something fell to the ground a few yards to his left. Lor'themar tried to jump up on reflex, only to hiss furiously as his chains snapped taut, yanking him back onto his rear. _Teeth of a troll,_ had they actually _tethered_ him to this tree?!

The fallen thing thrashed across the forest floor, warbling and screeching in a high, unnatural voice. It took Lor'themar a moment to realize the tortured creature was an owl... or what was left of one. Its feathers had fallen away from it in great chunks, laying bare raw flesh streaked with too-dark blood.

The bird let out a long, awful scream—and then fell utterly still, its head tilted at an unnatural angle, allowing Lor'themar to see its mangled face. The tip of its beak had been broken off, and one side of its face was bashed and bloodied, as though it had taken a heavy blow with a blunt object... or inflicted one upon itself in its death throes.

As Lor'themar watched, the wide, gold eyes glazed completely over, then began to glow with a sickly blue light. Its broken form stirred, then rose in an almost robotic manner to preen its ruined wings and fly back into the canopy with the creaking of brittle bones.

Lor'themar's stomach twisted dangerously. He laid his head back again and breathed shallowly through parted lips, trying to pull himself away from the grisly scene. He was not an elfling anymore, and this was not the first reanimation he had witnessed. That did not dampen the horror of it.

He was a ranger, a child of the trees and streams, a brother of the wild things that inhabited them. This decimation, this... wanton corruption of nature...

He shook his head, then winced as his skullcap promptly tried to rocket through his scalp. The pain swamped him for a moment; when he resurfaced from it, he turned his attention again to his surroundings.

The Scourge surrounded him on every side, though few of the shambling, stinking, rotting army paid him any mind. Good—Lor'themar used their inattentiveness to scan the gaps in their reanimated forms for any sign of other living captives.

He found none, though he doubted that was because there were none. Keeping the prisoners within view of each other was an amateur's mistake; he had learned that as a young recruit, and although his prisoners had always been trolls, the basic principals remained the same. Prisoners kept together could conspire together; prisoners who could see each other could still communicate with careful gestures and pointed looks. To break a prisoner, it was first imperative to separate him from anyone he might consider an ally, even if that meant periodically changing out the guards set to watch him.

Beyond that, the Scourge were becoming restless. Lor'themar had battled them long enough to recognize this behavior: They must sense there were warm, living bodies in the area besides his own. Their rambling made it impossible to see more than a few dozen yards ahead; something could approach him and Lor'themar likely wouldn't notice until—

A dark-robed cultist knelt down beside him with a dish half-loaded with cooked meat. Caught entirely off guard by her appearance, Lor'themar snarled wordlessly at the sallow-faced woman. It had little effect; she simply stared back at him with all the thin patience of a parent waiting for her child to stop throwing a tantrum.

"And what a frightening creature you make, all bound and bloodied," the cultist commented dryly as she cut a bit of meat, speared it on her knife, and held it up to Lor’themar’s mouth. "I’ve brung you food, on His Majesty's orders." When Lor’themar made no move towards the food, she snorted and said, "I was you, I’d eat. Better that than whatever he’ll do if you don’t.”

Lor’themar glowered at the woman and ground his teeth tight against each other. No doubt the undercooked bit of meat in front of him had been poisoned somehow; he’d rather be ripped to pieces than die some slow, thrice-painful death because he was fool enough to eat tainted food.

"Stubborn fool," the cultist sighed. "It’s safe food, just a bit raw. Raw meat hasn’t ever killed no one, not in my experience. And wouldn't I know best?" She grinned wolfishly at him.

"Exactly what kind of meat is that?” Lor’themar snapped, spitting the words out through clenched teeth so the woman had no opening to force the bit on her knife into his mouth while he spoke.

"Pork." The woman's eyes stayed steady on his own.

Were he in a more favorable position, Lor’themar might have laughed. Of course she would call it pork. The trolls he had battled called it by the same name, usually to taunt him while he cut them down or oversaw their interrogations.

He remembered very vividly the first time he’d encountered the Amani’s version of pork. He had been younger then, and initially he had been confused—for how could they have gotten pork when there were no pigs among the beasts they raised, nor wild boar in the lands they inhabited?

He had vomited when he had discovered the desecrated elven corpses not twenty yards from the trolls' cook fire. His stomach was stronger now, and his mind much sharper. He turned his head away with a dismissive snort.

Pain seared through his arms as he was dragged sideways. Lor'themar's shout was smothered with the pork, and then a bony hand slammed his jaw shut and shoved his head back until he was pinned against the tree.

For a wild moment, the elf struggled to breathe around the mouthful—and then his years of training kicked in, and he swallowed the meat whole. At least the piece was small enough to go down without too much trouble.

The cultist finally let him go, again moving with surprising speed as she pulled her hand out of biting range. Either this woman was far more physically fit than her emaciated frame suggested, or Lor'themar had lost far more of his own strength than he had previously suspected. His own complacency with her had done him no favors, either.

"There," she said reprovingly. "In'nit so much easier when you don't fuss, you great brat?"

She turned away before he could respond and barked at a nearby bone soldier in the language of the Scourge. Lor'themar tried to choke up the meat while her back was turned, only to snarl again as she gave the chains around his arms another sharp tug.

He must be tethered to the tree, after all. Her hand hadn't once brushed his arms.

"Don't go gettin' antsy, now" the cultist told him as the bone soldier wandered over. Lor'themar felt the chain change hands to the skeleton, and then the woman was cutting another bite of 'pork' and spearing it on her knife. "Behave, or we'll be doing this the hard way."

The bone soldier pulled at the chains as if in agreement.

Lor'themar tried to resist anyway, but his efforts proved in vain. Gritting his teeth only earned him more painful jerks that sent those damned spiked chains sawing into his flesh until he shouted again. Attempting to bite the cultist was also out of the question; even when he finally caught and broke her fingers between his teeth, the woman only laughed and boxed him hard across the ears, stunning him long enough to sneak another bite into his mouth.

In the end, Lor'themar was forced to accept the food without complaint, though he kept his gaze on anything that was not the morsels he was fed. He didn't dare close his eyes outright; that would only give him more attention to spend on what was happening.

The whole disgusting process went along rather quickly after that, and soon enough the plate was mercifully empty. Without another word, the cultist gathered it and her knife and walked away with the bone soldier in tow, leaving Lor'themar alone with the taste of meat lingering in his mouth.

Behind his revulsion, the ranger's survival instincts ran at high gear, washing away his despondency and replacing it with cold practicality.

Whatever their reason, these monstrosities seemed intent on keeping him alive and in at least somewhat decent condition. There could be no other reason why they would feed him anything at all; what advantage was there in feeding a prisoner they intended to kill and reanimate?

They were feeding him, and whatever food they gave him would help Lor'themar recover his strength and energy, which in turn would eventually speed his body's recovery. Whether they realized it or not, they were helping him become better able to escape.

...And that meat _had_ tasted very much like pork.

Unseen by the tethered elf, a low-flying orb the color of fouled water dissipated into the already polluted air. Far across the Scourge camp, at the edge of the dying forest, Arthas smirked and waved a second orb away; it dissolved like the first as the death knight rose from his seat.

He had been watching his prisoner for some time, taking special note of the elf's reactions to both the dying bird and the food he was brought. Every tiny movement, every shift in voice was a clue to breaking him down a little faster, and it amused him to no end to watch the man fight his captors. It was as though he believed he had some chance of escaping despite being surrounded on all sides by enemies who could not care less if he died or lost a limb. The bravado almost made up for how easily he was distressed by the tortured wildlife.

At least the elf knew when to quit—and a good thing, too, considering that meat was the only meal he would get until tomorrow night, if he was lucky.

Something would have to be done about his arms, though. While using the chains to force him to cooperate was effective, it wouldn’t do to let the idiot keep bleeding all over the place. For one thing, he was surrounded by cannibalistic undead, and had already nearly become a meal for two of them; for another, if he continued losing so much blood he would probably die.

Normally the latter wouldn't bother Arthas so much, considering the circumstances… but he didn’t want the elf dead just yet. That would take all the fun out of breaking him.

Still smirking, the death knight stepped outside his tent and turned his attention to the little village just beyond the forest. The nearest building was hardly more than a ten-minute trot from the treeline, but these redwoods grew so tightly together that hiding an army among them had been child's play. The fact that none of the little villagers had wandered this direction had only been icing on the cake.

Already lights were beginning to go out in some of the thatch-roofed cottages, though the sun had not quite dipped below the horizon line yet. With the settlement sorely outnumbered and its strongest denizens weary from a day off hard work, the village was ripe for the taking—but Arthas intended to attack when every house was dark.

He didn’t need to wait for everyone to be abed, of course; these hapless peasants had no sense of the danger lurking beyond their little village, and their panic would cripple them in the coming attack. But it seemed so very fitting that death should rain down on them in the shadows of the night, when their precious Light was nowhere to be seen and their own eyes already showed them monsters that were not there... at least, not yet.

He still had plenty of time to prepare his forces and gather his audience. After all, he wanted the elf to have a good view of the night's festivities. If he was sickened by the fate of some worthless owl, Arthas was keen to see how badly he would be shaken by the screams of these peasants.

This was going to be a very interesting night.

✳

It was sometime after nightfall when Lor'themar was jolted from his brooding. Bone soldiers laid hands on him, untethering him from the tree and hauling him to his feet before he'd had enough time to respond.

They had more difficulty attempting to move him forward. Bracing his feet, Lor'themar lurched to one side, literally throwing his weight about and throwing one of the Scourge soldiers off its feet and unbalancing another. The other two undead jerked him back as he attempted to push the opening he'd created, and the result was a furious tangle of living and fetid limbs as the elf and his guards went tumbling to the ground.

Logically, Lor'themar knew this was not a fight he could win; although he was no longer tethered to the tree, his arms were still firmly bound behind his back. Evidently his captors had taken into account the likelihood of him ripping away from the tree.

Even still, the ranger thrashed and kicked as hard as he could, eager to deal plenty of damage before the two he had knocked away before could join the brawl. He did manage to land a few square blows, but those were not enough on their own to drive off his wardens. All too soon, the rotted warriors had wrestled their struggling captive back under control and had him pinned to the ground on his stomach.

"This _again_?" a woman's voice demanded. "All you needed to do was drag 'im to the edge o' the trees like you was told."

Lor'themar didn't have to look around to know that voice belonged to the same cultist from earlier—which was good, because with four creatures of various races and in various stages of decomposition sitting on him, there wasn't very much room for him to move at the moment.

Detritus crunched as the cultist came closer; Lor'themar bared his teeth at her as she crouched beside him.

"It ain't even that hard controlling him," the woman continued, completely ignoring the ranger in favor of scowling at his handlers. "Don't you 'ave any brains left?"

One of the soldiers on top of Lor'themar shifted at that. Apparently that one had enough left to take offense.

A hand knotted itself into his hair, dragging sharp nails across his scalp. Pain scorched through Lor'themar, blinding him and making his blood thunder in his ears.

By the time he was able to think straight again, the cultist and his handlers were bodily dragging him through the rest of the army, taking no notice as he continued to thrash against them. If he tried to pull back, the cultist dragged him forward by his hair and sent another spike of agony rocketing down his spine.

It took too long to start thinking through his own pain, to say nothing of the effort that went into stifling his rage at this treatment. His training kicked in only by increments, and every new shock of pain put him a step back again.

His senses told him he was at the heart of the Scourge army; somewhere in his haze his rational mind urged him to cooperate, because there was no hope of winning a fight here, not like this. These weren't trolls yanking on his hair in the middle of a fair brawl. Cutting someone's hand or ear off here in the midst of a blind rage wouldn't give him any opening. He knew that.

Eventually he was shoved down against another tree. His head slammed hard against the trunk, stunning him long enough that he was finally able to bring himself back under control. Dimly he could hear the cultist sneer something as he was tethered down again, but he couldn't make out a word she said through the ringing in his ears.

Someone kicked his leg, not hard enough to hurt but certainly hard enough to move it. Lor'themar felt himself bare his teeth again in reaction before his senses kicked in and belatedly informed him that doing so was very stupid and likely to result in more rough handling. His vision took a moment longer to stop spinning, but Lor'themar knew the shape well enough to be able to identify the man standing over him regardless.

"I should have expected a ranger to act like a rabid dog in captivity," Arthas commented. "I'm surprised you didn't bite anyone."

Lor'themar swallowed down the bile that rose in his throat. Against any living opponent, he _would_ have used his teeth as well—but not here. No elf had bitten one of the Scourge to his knowledge, and if they had they had been struck down too swiftly for anyone to tell whether doing so might have infected them. Lor'themar wasn't quite desperate enough to find out for himself.

Movement in the corner of his eye momentarily drew the ranger's attention to the rest of the Scourge. The undead no longer milled aimlessly about; now their eyes and sockets and deformed heads all turned to focus on something beyond Lor'themar, and handful by handful they began wandering in one direction. An eerie quietness followed them, a stillness that belonged in the graves they had vacated. No moan or hiss escaped even the most fetid wretches; even the rattling of the skeleton soldiers seemed subdued, as though they somehow still possessed enough awareness to move carefully.

Lor’themar strained against his chains, snarling as he watched the undead army march past him. He knew what all of this meant. He had seen this behavior too many times before during the fall of Quel'Thalas. The Scourge had found another settlement to destroy.

Arthas kicked his leg again, and this time the spiked toe of his boot broke through Lor'themar's breeches and punctured his skin. The bastard even had the gall to grin when Lor'themar snarled at him.

"There's a little farming village out that way," Arthas said, jerking his head in the same direction the army marched towards. "Since we can't take you with us, I thought I'd give you a good view while we went out to introduce ourselves to the locals."

"Frostbitten pig," Lor'themar spat, jerking forward again.

Arthas only stood over him and laughed at his struggles. "By all means, try to break loose," he said. "I'm curious how much damage you can do with so many innocent people about to die."

As Lor'themar strained against his bindings, his eyes traveled from Arthas to the horizon beyond him. The village was close enough that he could see lights in a few of the windows and little trails of smoke rising from the individual chimneys. Some of the inhabitants were still awake, then. If he could—

Arthas crouched down in front of him, blocking his line of vision. The wretch smirked at his snarl and reached out with one hand to flick a strand of hair from the elf's face.

"Struggle all you like," he murmured. "Scream if you want. Even if you manage to get some sort of warning out to those people, it won't change anything. If they arm themselves, they will prolong their own deaths by a few seconds. If they flee, my soldiers will hunt them down. There will be no escape for these peasants."

Lor'themar spat in his face.

Two of the nearest soldiers leapt forward, dragging at Lor'themar's hair and at the chains around his arms. The world turned red for a moment, but this time Lor'themar was better able to control himself through the fury and managed to fight down the urge to lash out at his tormentors.

Arthas was laughing at him again even as he waved away the two soldiers that had seized Lor'themar. The elf gritted his teeth against another livid round of invective. He wasn't going to give this madman the continued satisfaction of drawing a reaction from him. To hell with Arthas and his games.

Arthas didn't seem bothered by his silence. The bastard stood and tilted his head, but that damned smirk was still firm on his face as he stared down at Lor'themar.

"I'd get comfortable if I were you, elf," Arthas said. "This is going to be a long night."

He turned without another word and followed his undead horde towards the village, one hand resting on Frostmourne's hilt.

Lor’themar struggled again, but the chains held him fast and his rotted handful of guards were far stronger than their mummified tendons suggested. He had fought troll warlords who would have had greater trouble restraining him than these reanimated carcasses.

The Scourge army sped towards the village now, headed by a small mounted group; even from this distance, even in the midst of battling to free himself, Lor'themar could see enough to assume those forerunners must be Arthas' death knights.

Lor'themar ripped forward again with a roar, only for one of his guards to shove him back against the tree. The riders and their nearest comrades reached the nearest cottage at the same instant, and those on foot tore through the walls of the home as though they were built of paper rather than wood and plaster; seconds later the first screams tore through the night, rousing the rest of the village too late. The mounted death knights fell upon the first family to try to run; skeletons and ghouls tore into an elderly couple who stumbled outside moments after their cottage went up in flames.

Lor’themar cried out and fought even harder, fury pulsing through him as he watched the slaughter continue. Vaguely he registered the pain in his arms increasing as he pulled violently against the chains; out of the corner of his eye he saw one zombie’s hand come away smeared with his blood before it latched onto the front of his vest and tried to pin him back against the tree.

The ranger gave a single, furious twist with his whole body and sent a skeleton staggering into its nearest comrade. A second twist seemed to jerk the chain loose that tethered him to the tree, for there was the sound of saronite creaking against itself and wood splintering.

By now the guards had gathered themselves again and were actively wrapping their arms around his own, seeming to strain to hold him down as the last of the Scourge army charged past. Lor’themar let out a guttural roar and heaved again, and this time the chain on his arms snapped free of the trunk, sending him and his guards tumbling forward.

His handlers scrambled to restrain him as he continued to thrash; the chain still wrapped around his arms was beginning to creak now, and felt somewhat looser as Lor’themar’s struggles began to wear at the links.

Lor'themar might have overpowered the four undead soldiers wrestling with him, but they were not the only four who had remained. Unseen by the struggling elf, the same cultist who had helped to drag him to the forest's edge rolled her eyes and raised one hand towards him, speaking a word of power under her breath as she did so.

A bolt of searing, dark magic struck Lor’themar’s chest; for one wild moment, his entire torso seemed to freeze—and then agony knifed through him like hundreds of shards of ice burying themselves in his body, ripping a strangled cry from him as it passed.

That blow took the fight out of the ranger, and he sagged against the ground, still growling faintly as his chest heaved with exertion and lingering pain. The soldiers heaved him back against the tree, slamming him carelessly against the damaged trunk and paying him no heed when he snarled at the splinters that stabbed into his back and arms. One undead wrapped the tether firmly around its hand; another jerked Lor’themar’s head up by his hair, forcing his eyes to fall upon the burning village again. The final two soldiers sat down again on his legs and worked to bind his ankles together with another length of chain.

Still in debilitating pain and having used up what strength and energy he had recovered, Lor’themar could do nothing but watch and listen as the villagers were systematically slaughtered and raised as more soldiers for Arthas’s ever-growing army... just as the death knight had said it would be.

✴

The village fell in under half an hour; Arthas watched on with quiet pleasure as another gaggle of hapless mortals were turned into untiring, utterly loyal soldiers of the Scourge.

Or… most of them were, at least. The king felt something watching him, and as he turned his eyes immediately fell upon the same zombie that had lost an arm trying to gnaw on Lor’themar. It stared almost mournfully at him from across the village's sole street, and a sharp grin spread across Arthas' features as he spotted the child-sized, badly-burned corpse the creature huddled over. At his nod, the zombie turned and began to eat in earnest, making a mess that would put off a starving warg and snarling at anyone else that glanced its way.

Chuckling, Arthas turned and cast a speculative look towards the forest. How had the elf fared, he wondered, as he had listened to the slaughter unfold and watched the village burn? He wondered how much of a fight the idiot had put up, and how much it had taken to subdue him when he had.

A terrified shriek went up behind Arthas, cut short by a wet, slicing grind as a saronite blade fell upon the last living human in the village. Moments later, one of Arthas’s death knights appeared with his armor sprayed and dripping with fresh blood; a throat-cut ghoul hobbled eagerly along behind him, its flesh actively drying and decaying about it as it moved.

Arthas cast his eyes once more around the burning village, noting with a grin that some of the first cottages to have gone ablaze had already burned down to blackened, smoldering skeletons with bits of still-burning thatch littering their floors. The street was almost entirely red with the blood that had been shed, and the pitchforks and hunting knives taken up as arms by some of the stupider villagers lay scattered in that blood, broken and burnt.

He was satisfied; it was time to return to their camp and prepare to continue their march on Dalaran. With a swift gesture for the best-preserved soldiers to round up the rest, the champion led his army back towards the forest.

For a little while, nothing else stirred in the village—but the stillness did not last.

Blackened and missing all but its toughest sinews, the child's corpse twitched and slowly dragged itself upright; little bones cracked and rattled as burned tendons strained against the pull of gravity. One blistered, half-melted eye gazed blindly after the army before the little zombie gave a huff and hobbled after them on three limbs. Its other arm lay behind in the street, where fire swiftly reduced it to a gathering of scorched bones.


	3. Not By Bread Alone

Lor'themar had not recovered by the time the village began to smolder. Time had blurred around him; with no hope of breaking free in time to help the villagers and scarcely any energy left to try, he had been left with no other recourse but to lower his head and block out as much as he could.

He knew roughly when it ended, because at some point there were no more screams on the air. When he raised his head again, only a few dying fires still burned amongst the blackened skeletons of the cottages. No bodies seemed to move amongst the wreckage, not that he truly expected anything to have survived.

Pain lanced through his wrist, bringing his attention at last to the fact that his arms were no longer chained behind him—instead, one was held by two bone soldiers, and the other was kept immobile by a third skeleton while the cultist woman tended to the deep, ugly gashes wrapping all around his forearm.

"Don’t go thinking to struggle," the cultist warned him without looking up from her work. "You’re in enough trouble as it stands with him. Threw a fit, he did. Called the four guarding you incompetent, took one’s head off—that one’s still looking for its head, last I seen of it.”

Lor’themar didn’t answer; he could barely muster the energy to grunt as a swell of sickly bluish-gray magic swirled from the woman’s fingertips and seeped into his wounds like a gaseous sludge, arousing a sharp, icy pain in the exposed meat and muscle as his arm sewed itself together with a gut-churning series of squelches.

It took a full minute for the healing process to finish with his right arm, and when it did there were still several large, angry pink marks marking his skin where the gashes had been. It was only then that Lor’themar noticed the dried blood that should have still colored his arm an ugly copper-red had been thoroughly cleaned away; apparently even that could prove to be too much temptation for some of the weaker-willed members of this fetid army. Perhaps that was why his new guards were all bone soldiers with no stomachs to fill or gullets to swallow with.

"Gimme the other one," the woman ordered the skeletons pinning his left arm.

Had they not kept such a tight grip on the mangled limb, Lor’themar might have fallen over when they jerked it around for the woman to work on. As it was, he could do little else but growl feebly and give such a pathetic tug against those bony grips that he doubted they even felt the backward pull.

"Don’t twitch too much, or you’ll heal funny," the woman warned him. She had yet to look Lor’themar in the eye. "You’re lucky he wants you living, or you’d be ghoul food by now. Show a little gratitude afore he decides to change his mind."

The second healing took even longer than the first, and seemed to Lor’themar to be even more painful—rightly so, since his left arm had been bound in such a way that it had taken the brunt of the abuse inflicted by his previous guards and his own frenzied struggles. The gashes here were deeper, and in some places there was the bright white flash of a few centimeters of exposed bone.

By the time his arm was finished, the ranger had his wits about him once more, and rather than fight the skeletons as they shifted to lay bare his chest for the cultist to heal, he held still and forced himself to cooperate for now. He needed the healing here as badly as he had for his arms; his chest felt as though it had been scraped at with sandpaper, then burned, then stuck unprotected against a glacier, and then ripped away from that glacier in one hard jerk.

If the skeleton holding his head back would have allowed him, Lor'themar might have looked down to see for himself how far the damage went. Instead it seemed he wasn't to be given that luxury. Someone capable of giving orders must have decided it was best to treat him as though he might lash out at any moment.

The woman's hands _did_ come into his line of sight for just a moment. Through the scattering of copper-colored stains on her hand, Lor'themar could see that her fingers still bore the teeth marks he had left in them earlier that day—evidently she didn't think the lacerations warranted as much attention as the broken bones had. Still, it was an unwelcome reminder that their paranoia was justified; if a prisoner fought being fed, who was to say he wouldn't also fight being healed?

He ground his teeth as the cultist’s hands settled against what he could only imagine must be the crater her own spell had left behind after carving a pound or two of flesh away from him. He had just watched her fix his arms. He _knew_ she didn't need to physically touch him to do her work.

“Quit growling,” the woman told him as ice again seemed to settle in his flesh. “It's your own blasted fault for fightin' when you ought to have sat still. What did you really think you'd do if you got free? Take on a whole army by yourself?”

Lor'themar's nostrils flared, but he didn’t dignify her question with a response. It was an asinine question—and he had no answers that made sense, now that his mind was clear again. There _wasn’t_ anything he could have done except flee, and he hadn't intended to flee while he was busy struggling against his restraints.

“Stupid fool,” the woman muttered after a moment.

The damage to his chest must not have run as deeply as he'd thought; this time the cultist finished swiftly, and although the process had still stung like fury, the pain had been more bearable.

The relief lasted for all of four seconds, and then the skeletons were hauling him forward to give the cultist access to his back. The shreds of compliance he had managed to draw about himself fell away in an instant, and despite the little dots of pain that flared in his back with each movement the ranger began to twist and jerk against the bony limbs restraining him. Like hell—!

The cultist growled low in her throat and finally smacked Lor’themar across the back of his head—not hard enough even to stun him, but certainly hard enough to remind him that he still had a blistering migraine on top of everything else.

"No more of that," she snapped. "D’you want your back fixed or don’t you?"

Lor’themar bared his teeth at her, but wasn't able to respond before someone else cut in and said, “I don’t believe I ever left that up to him.”

Lor’themar looked up as far as he could manage to see Arthas standing over him, arms crossed over his chest and aggravation plain on his features as he glared down at the elf.

Lor’themar vaguely registered the cultist’s hands twitch for a moment against his back at the bastard prince’s sudden appearance. Good; at least he wasn't the only one less than thrilled to see this pig standing in front of them.

"Apologies, Lord," the cultist said. One of her hands left Lor'themar's back, only to be replaced by the tip of a cold blade.

Lor'themar snarled and again tried to pull away, only to have his progress halted by the skeletons. The knife was removed almost immediately, but still he continued to struggle. He wasn't about to keep his back open to attack, not now that someone had drawn a blade on him.

One booted foot came down on his ankles, which were still crossed and bound with chains. Arthas returned the glare Lor'themar shot him coolly; irritation lingered on the human’s face.

"Sit still and let her do her work, elf," Arthas told him flatly, "unless you want me to give her more to do."

“Ain't you ever had splinters taken outta you before?” The cultist still had her hand against his back, and as she spoke she again set the knife to his skin. “Or do you elves have some fancy, bloodless way of getting the big ones out from under flesh?”

Lor’themar growled, but finally forced himself to sit still. No, he knew damn well how larger splinters needed to be removed—and the tree he sat against _had_ felt tattered while his chest was being seen to, so perhaps his back was in worse shape than he realized. In any event, he had little choice but to cooperate; Arthas remained standing over him, placing a good portion of his weight on the ranger’s ankles and resting one hand almost casually upon the hilt of Frostmourne as he stared down at the captive elf.

Lor'themar’s teeth came hard together again as the cultist carved into his back. It _did_ feel as though she cut around something large… though surely she worked as slowly as she did out of spite. She was living; she should still have some idea of what hurt a mortal creature.

The knife finally finished its pass, and with a wet ripping sound something jagged and splintering was dislodged from his flesh. The ranger couldn’t quite bite back the snarl he let out as a result, and Arthas snorted in amusement at the show of weakness.

“Well, there's one,” the cultist murmured, stopping for a moment to toss the splinter aside. It landed where Lor'themar could see it; the thing was easily four or five centimeters long, and from the look of it all but the very tip of one end had been embedded in him.

The process continued. After his last outburst, Lor'themar was determined to show no further sign that he was in pain, and clenched his jaw as he felt the cultist's knife carve away little piece after little piece of his flesh. At least the cutting was better than the rooting around she sometimes did instead with her fingers.

This was why Lor'themar had never been fond of healer-magi before the Scourge invasion. He had always assumed that they would be as careless as this woman was with the hands-on portion of their work, since they wielded magic to clean up after themselves. He wondered whether it was that or simple spite that guided the cultist's behavior. At least it felt as though she was making progress, and as long as she did Lor'themar was willing to hold still.

After another moment, however, Arthas appeared to grow bored with the lack of continued resistance; without a word the death knight finally moved off of Lor’themar’s ankles and moved to his side to get a look at the damage for himself. The second Lor'themar turned to keep the man in sight, Arthas reached down and placed one hand atop his head.

He didn’t grip the elf's hair, nor did he use his hold on Lor’themar’s head to try to twist his neck—and the seeming carelessness of his gesture made Lor’themar stiffen with a strangled whimper he could only pray no one had noticed.

No one reacted to it, in any event; the woman continued working to rip the shards out of his back, the skeletons did not turn to look at him with their empty sockets, and Arthas did not make any comment. Neither did he remove his damned hand from Lor’themar’s scalp. Lor’themar swallowed hard and closed his eyes, desperate to ignore the touch as he tried to focus instead on the conversation Arthas was having with his cultist.

"One elf gave you enough trouble that you felt the need to blast him?" Arthas was asking. He sounded incredulous, but Lor'themar thought there was the faintest note of humor to it, as well.

"By then he’d broke the chains off the tree, Lord," the cultist answered. "The skeletons looked like they was having trouble getting him quiet again, and—"

"And you hit him with a spell powerful enough to lodge shards of the tree in his back.” That wasn't a question, Lor'themar noted as the shock of Arthas’ continued contact with his scalp slowly began to wear away.

"No, see, that was after the spell hit him, Lord, when they was shoving him back against the tree. He’d tore the chains loose, and there was shards of wood still hanging loose when they tossed him back against the trunk." The woman’s voice trembled slightly; apparently even she was smart enough not to tangle with Arthas.

Lor’themar’s eyes rolled back for an instant as Arthas’s fingertips dug into his head slightly, sending a fresh shockwave racing down Lor'themar's spine. Did this bastard have _any_ idea what he was doing? Surely he had worked with elves in life enough to know how sensitive they were to touch—!

The human's fingers twitched again, and this time Lor'themar slammed his eyes shut and bit down hard on the inside of his cheek to block out the sensation. He must know he was doing _something_ , surely, or this would not continue.

A third twitch almost made him bite through his cheek outright.

The healing done to his back seemed to take an agonizing eternity, and it was made even longer thanks to Arthas digging his fingers into the top of Lor’themar’s scalp at odd intervals. It was almost as though it was a habit of the bastard’s, a stand-in for tapping his fingers or pacing, and _Light help him_ if he didn't take his hand away soon Lor'themar wasn't going to be able to continue sitting still.

Finally— _finally_ —it ended, and with another stab of icy pain the last of his injuries was sealed shut again. It took every ounce of Lor'themar's willpower not to sigh in relief as the cultist finally sat back and said, “That's the last of it, Lord. Don't seem to be any more marks on him.”

"Good." Arthas’s tone was clinical now, but at the first tiny upward tilt of Lor’themar’s head his grip tightened, sending another shiver down the ranger’s spine as he turned and barked out an order in the Scourge tongue. He kept hold of Lor'themar as he waited for that order to be carried out, though Lor'themar doubted very much that the cultist lacked the power or will to subdue her charge a second time should the need arise.

The skeleton guards returned, and one of them had a bundle of fabric wadded up between its hands. Arthas finally released Lor'themar and stepped away to let his soldiers wrestle the elf under control before he had the chance to try struggling.

The wad of fabric turned out to be a coarse cotton tunic that was scorched black across one shoulder and stained with still-drying blood across the side. Lor'themar's lip curled at the smell of it, but common sense won out over his disgust and he put up no resistance as the skeleton crew dragged the filthy garment over his head.

His arms were bound in leather straps, then wrapped again in those damned chains—but he was not tethered to the tree before the skeletons stood and backed away from him. He found out why a moment later, when Arthas grabbed him by one arm and wrenched him to his feet.

Lor'themar snarled again as the rough treatment twisted the muscles in his shoulder, but Arthas gave him no time to recover before dragging him over to another supply wagon. More than once his toes ran against an upraised rock or root; unbooted and wrapped only in his wool stockings, his feet throbbed with fresh pain at each impact, and by the time Arthas finally stopped Lor’themar was certain at least one or two of his toes had been broken. He wondered darkly whether Arthas would consider those worth the hassle of fixing.

That train of thought came screeching to a halt as Arthas suddenly grabbed him by the back of his tunic and tossed him into the wagon as though the elf weighed no more than a small cat. The impact knocked the air from Lor’themar, and for a moment he could do nothing but lay stunned where he landed.

"Try to behave yourself this time, elf," Arthas told him as the world slowly stopped spinning. “The rebelliousness is beginning to lose its charm—and I doubt you can take too much more abuse at the moment.”

“Nether take you,” Lor’themar spat.

Arthas snorted derisively, and then as quick as a snakestrike he caught and rubbed one of Lor’themar’s ear tips between his thumb and forefinger. Lor’themar’s eyes rolled back again as Arthas rubbed the sensitive organ almost speculatively. A low, rasping hiss seethed through the elf’s clenched teeth; somewhere beyond the roaring in his ears he was certain he heard Arthas chuckling.

Just as suddenly as he had started, the bastard released his ear and withdrew with a smirk. Lor’themar snarled furiously at him, but that only seemed to amuse the human even more.

"Enjoy the ride," the death knight said as the four bone soldiers climbed into the wagon with Lor’themar. The back of the wagon slammed shut, and in another few moments the transport jerked to a start as the undead army continued on its southward march.

✴

The next few days passed far too languidly for Arthas’ taste. They passed no new villages to slaughter, and the calm brought with it a certain sort of monotony that made the death knight almost wish he still had any need for sleep. He had never been a patient man in life, and he certainly wasn’t one now. He needed to kill something that wasn’t already dead.

At least the journey was bearable enough, especially with Kel’Thuzad’s errand in mind. The portal they were to wrest from the Blackrock orcs was crucial, and—far more importantly, in Arthas’ mind—it would be a refreshing change of pace to kill greenskins again.

Lor’themar was a more pressing concern. After they had continued on from the ruined village, he had become aggravatingly compliant. No more skeletons were kicked to pieces as they wrestled the prisoner out to stretch his legs, and Dana was no longer on the receiving end of any bone-breaking snaps of the former ranger’s teeth when she fed him. Even Arthas was only occasionally treated to a sullen glare when he rode by the wagon to look in on the elf.

That was… unfortunate. Arthas had thought there would be far more fire to the man than this. He was of no interest to Arthas if watching the destruction of one measly little village had been enough to break him.

Dana was unconcerned when Arthas approached her for an update on the man’s status. Far from being broken, she had assured Arthas that Lor’themar was “only a bit stunned” and would soon snap out of it. Her prognosis was the only thing staying Arthas’ hand, for the moment—and even his trust in the cultist was beginning to wear thin.

He slowed Invincible, letting the charger fall back through the ranks as his soldiers marched past him with only a few curious glances in his direction. Another discussion with Dana was in order; perhaps she would be able to elicit some stronger reaction from the elf.

The cultist rode at the front of the cart, seated sideways and bareback atop the rotted draft horse that pulled it. An odd spot to rest, but it kept Dana near the cart and allowed her to keep her energy in reserve for any outbursts from their prisoner—however unlikely they might be. Though already straight-backed on her perch, the woman pulled her shoulders back and raised her head attentively as she watched Arthas approach.

“Still no change, I take it,” Arthas commented.

“None, Lord.” Dana cast an irritable glance over her shoulder at the cart. “He's well outta shock by now. Can't be a rallyin’ point if he's that weak.”

A corner of Arthas’ mouth twitched at that. “You think he's faking it.”

“An’ doin’ too good at it.” The woman leaned over and spat on the ground—on the other side of the draft from where Arthas rode. “Fool gets himself killed an’ turned, jus’ as he _doesn't_ want happenin’. Doesn't make any sense.”

“Then let's give him a chance to save himself, shall we?” Arthas drew Invincible closer beside the draft horse and said, “You're around him the most consistently. You know how to set him off, so do it. Make him prove he's still worth my time.”

Dana flashed him a wicked grin, then placed her hand across her chest and bowed as well as she was able to astride the draft horse. “I exist to serve, Milord,” she told him. Her voice was thick with anticipation. “He'll be kickin’ skellies apart again in no time.”

“He'd better be,” Arthas answered as he urged Invincible forward again. “For his sake _and_ yours.”

Despite his warning, the champion was in a generous mood, and waited until late into the afternoon for Dana to make good on her promise. She disappeared into the sea of undead for a while, then entered the cart at her usual time with a little brown package in one hand. She had picked up quite a flair for gallows humor; Arthas neither knew nor cared exactly where she got the meat she fed the elf, but wrapping it like a purchase from the village butcher likely did the woman no favors with Lor'themar.

Hours dragged on with no notable breaks in the tedium. Arthas’ soldiers visibly and audibly chafed under the unreasonably sunny skies, and occasionally a scuffle broke out between the lower-ranking men and women as they turned on each other for entertainment, but beyond that there was nothing more than the silence of a deserted wilderness and the increasingly agitating lack of real action.

After another two hours, Arthas called the procession to a halt and ordered his soldiers to make camp for the night. None of them needed the rest, obviously, but as long as there was nothing to be killed and no entertainment to be gleaned from his prisoner, Arthas thought he could at least occupy his time by sorting through the heads of his latest recruits. Perhaps Lor'themar's risen comrades could give him some insight into how he could rile the man up again.

Dana appeared outside the wagon again once they halted, her expression grim as she wiped her hands across the front of her cult robes and stalked out of sight. If she returned to the wagon after that, she did so while Arthas’ attention was on his elves.

They came to him readily when he called for them—something he noted with a spiteful satisfaction after the hard weeks of resistance they had put up in life—but the first few had little left of their former lives. Apparently a pitfall of recruiting soldiers from the aftermath of such a violent resistance was the poor state of their minds upon reanimation. Many of the undead elves had been so ravaged as they fell that their memories had been rendered inaccessible.

His third or fourth call herded a former ranger woman to him. She looked promising enough; her head hadn't been caved in or split open, and her face, though blank and spattered now with dried gore, didn't look as though it had taken any hard blows as she died. Apparently the sweeping gash across her abdomen had been enough on its own to take her down.

It was interesting how little the undead elves seemed to respond to touch. Where Lor'themar had been rather handily incapacitated by it, none of the elven foot soldiers so far had done more than flinch from Arthas’ hand atop their head the way any human zombie would. Arthas spared enough time to wonder whether any of his better preserved elves were as unaffected by physical contact, then shrugged to himself and peered into the mind of his current informant. There would be time later to investigate, if the mood struck him—

_Long-fingered hands ran through hair the color of cornsilk; soft fingertips stroked against the skin of the man’s scalp now and then, drawing low, pleased rumbles from the other’s throat as his head tilted back. His neck stretched out like a fluid thing beneath her, the hard muscles there rippling under his skin in the soft glow of sunlight through the walls of the tent._

_"You purr like any of the lynxes," a woman’s voice teased the man. "I wonder if you leave marks like they do, as well?"_

_The man’s brown eyes flickered open as he shifted to look at his companion; mischief danced in his gaze as he responded, “You are certainly welcome to find out, Ameniel—as long as you aren’t supposed to be on watch soon.” A wicked grin flashed across his features, and the expression startled the woman. It wasn’t often he looked so roguish._

_The woman laughed and twined her arms about his shoulders, then leaned down to kiss the side of his jaw before she murmured, “Oh, I’m sure I can handle whatever you can throw at me, Lor’themar…”_

The memory ended there, fading swiftly into an incoherent storm of darkness and faded, distorted images. Arthas smirked as he pulled his hand away from the woman's head; her lank, brown hair swayed about her shoulders as she groaned and wandered clumsily away.

Well, it was a start, in any event. Arthas scratched his chin thoughtfully as he surveyed his forces. It was a pity Ameniel’s memory ended as soon as it did; he would also have enjoyed seeing the sort of marks his prisoner was capable of leaving—especially, he thought with a grimace at the horizon, since Lor'themar was swiftly running out of time.

Arthas waited another hour, but when the light falling across the Scourge camp had gone from scarlet to violet and there had still been no change, he pushed himself to his feet and stalked through his forces with a low growl. Apparently the effort he had put into keeping the fool alive had been for nothing; Lor'themar was already a broken man, and it had only taken the destruction of one little farming village to do it.

Or so he thought.

He hadn’t yet drawn level with the elf's transport when the quiet was shattered by a familiar snarl. The wagon shook with the brawl that followed, and the rotted draft horse strapped to it snorted and tossed its mummified head as the commotion threatened to drag it off its hooves.

The soldiers surrounding the cart eyed the cart indecisively. The less-preserved among them looked to their more intact comrades for direction, unwilling to receive the beatings that usually rewarded shows of unauthorized violence. The more cognitively inclined undead in turn glanced between themselves before shaking their heads or otherwise signaling that their fellows should stay out of it—a decision no doubt influenced by Arthas’ own approach.

The brawl had ended for the most part by the time he reached the wagon; Lor'themar's handful of skeleton guards were sitting on top of the elf, and Dana was shouting at him in the Scourge tongue, cursing Lor'themar and the “bitch in heat” who gave birth to him. She stood awkwardly, and after a moment Arthas realized why: she was cradling one very bloodied hand against her stomach. Judging by the grin clawing its way across her face, the pain was not the cause of her tirade.

Lor'themar was still growling and struggling as well as he was able beneath the skeletons; Arthas couldn't see his face, but a stray line the ranger shouted in Thalassian—one of the few with which Arthas was familiar after his attack on Quel'Thalas—seemed delivered more clumsily than the cries Arthas had heard on the battlefield.

Dana was the first to see Arthas approach; her grin widened until her upper and lower gums were visible, lines of anemic, pale pink flesh that flashed white against her yellowed teeth. Her pupils were telescoped to near invisibility.

“Told ‘im ‘e was eatin’ some li’l brat fresh from its crib,” the cultist said by way of explanation. Lor'themar snarled and thrashed again as she continued, “Asked ‘im how it was, eatin’ sommat that cried the whole while. Whether the tears added flavorin’, like.”

Arthas laughed, and when Lor'themar's snarling turned to an enraged roar, he laughed even louder. One skeleton was thrown hard against the wall of the cart before Dana was able to aim a kick at the elf's head. It was a glancing blow and unlikely to concuss him again, but it was enough to make the man fall still.

“If I knew you were this much of a bleeding heart, I would have brought you along while I raised that last village.” Arthas grinned as Lor'themar spat another familiar curse at him in Thalassian. The elf's voice was hoarse with rage, but there was little he could do in his current position.

At Arthas’ nod, the skeletons hauled Lor'themar up so that he sat awkwardly on his legs and shoved him back against the wall of the cart. Now Arthas could see the livid red weal blooming across the former ranger's right cheek—a wide, straight line that looked as though it came from one of the ratted leather belts hanging around the lead skeleton's waist.

Arthas spared the skeleton soldier a closer look. Sure enough, one of those belts was undone, hastily looped around and through the soldier's bones rather than tied in a ring that rested atop its pelvis.

“How badly did he make you beat him this time?” Arthas asked, swiftly settling into a more authoritative tone and posture as he returned his attention to Dana. The woman was still grinning maniacally as she snapped the bones of one of her fingers back into alignment with the thumb and pinky of her other hand.

“Bit me first, so a sharp club t’the ear started it,” she answered, stopping to meet his gaze. Her eyes were as feral as her expression. “Then I kicked ‘im, an’ then the skellies dogpiled on ‘im.” She tilted her head, the light in her eyes dimming somewhat as she added, “D’you know, after that I couldn't see much’a what happened ‘sides the belt comin’ off and around. I expect ‘e’s got some bruises, maybe a cut or two, pro’ly a cracked rib…”

At Arthas’ raised eyebrow, she caught herself and gave a quick, shallow bow as she added, “Ah, nothin’ serious, Lord, certainly nothin’ I can't fix right quick—”

“If there isn't anything immediately life-threatening, leave it for now,” Arthas told her. He did, after all, have the role of displeased captor to play for Lor'themar's benefit. “The elf needs to learn to behave himself. Leave him to suffer until sundown tomorrow. We should reach the orc encampment by then.”

Dana nodded sharply, then turned to Lor'themar and, with the more intact of her hands, tossed a ball of shimmering magic at the prisoner. The elf flinched as the orb vanished into his skin and bared his teeth as the skeleton soldiers kept him pinned, but after a moment Dana made a noncommittal sound in the back of her throat and dismissed the spell, leaving no mark on the man when it had passed.

“Nothin’ that'll kill ‘im overnight,” Dana reported. “We'll jes’ have t’keep an eye on ‘im ‘til tomorrow night.” She sniffed and kicked at Lor'themar's foot. “Jes’ a diagnostic spell, you big baby.”

Arthas snorted as the muscles along Lor'themar's jaw stood out in sharp relief. “Clench your teeth much tighter and they'll break, elf. Then what will you assault my cultists with? Harsh language?”

The look Lor’themar turned on him could have peeled granite. Arthas drank in the hatred there like water from a skin, smiling in the face of it even as the skeletons hauled their captive out to be tethered down for the night.


End file.
